Another maintenance block of time down. Honestly, I'm not in the mood to go back into deficit. I wonder what's wrong with me.

Anyway, as of late I've been exceptionally gassy. Like painful that would radiate through my body. I thought maybe it was food related during the deficit portion, but it has persisted throughout the maintenance period. I cut out cottage cheese, thinking I have some sort of lactose intolerance. I've never had any issue in this department, but I thought maybe I had some mild reaction. Nada. No improvement.

Today I've cut off the EC stack to see if I see any improvements with that. If that doesn't work, maybe the decaf coffee at McDonald's. Not sure what the deal is, but it sucks.

Also I've finished off like 8 weeks of my current workout regime, so I've changed up my workouts. I wanted to get back to Upper, lower regime, but without the weeks with double lower body. So it's M-U, W-L, F-U.

This Week

I'm debating whether I should do the EOD as planned or stick with maintenance until I figure out this issue. If it didn't get painful and wake me up in the night I'd probably be fine.

Well, I've eliminated my gassy problem. Now to reintroduce some things to figure out exactly what was causing the problem. I'll give it another day, but I think I'll try the EC stack first.

Also, over the last few days I've been feeling exceptionally tight in the lower body. I'm still following my mobility and flexibility routine, but I've noticed the last few times that hamstrings are very tight and hip flexion is also quite tight. Lower back is also fatigued feeling (or maybe sore or whatever - hard to describe).

I didn't bother doing another week of maintenance. I started into EOD, which seems to be going decently - so far. I also haven't added my EC stack back in yet. I'm still slowly adding in coffee to see if caffeine plays nice.

I did get all my workouts in. And all my planned flexibility and mobility work.

Still hungry a lot, though it's nice to have more flexibility on those workout days. I guess it's life of the deficit. I'm hoping I can keep these deficits to a minimum going forward.

EOD has been an interesting ride. Definitely doesn't have that dragging feeling of a longer deficit without an influx of something, though progress is slower. Also if my food becomes variable (not higher calorie, but higher in sodium) things appear to get off the rails, but it is still sort of cool.

I can say that my bowel movements are more regular. It's easier to mold social life around, as I can orient my schedule - whether gym or event - around my workout days.

At the very least, this strategy may prove to be an optimal tool for long term maintenance. The hardest part of maintenance is the evenness of it. Same calories every day. I just find it hard over the long run. With an EOD strategy I can eat in a deficit some days and eat maintenance/surplus on workout days. There's a swing in calories. The truth is that some days I don't need a lot of food. And other days I want it. One or two days of a deficit aren't that bad when the next day has a chunk of food coming.

That's the experience so far following EOD (1800 cals off, 2500 cals on). The weight has moved slow, but it should be pointed out that 80kg on EOD is different from 80kg on a straight deficit. On a straight deficit I deplete essentially. Water and glycogen just go away. On EOD I'm a little more filled up.

The plan for this upcoming week is to go on maintenance. I'm planning to do maintenance over the holidays, but we're almost there and I don't want to keep dieting all the way until that point. This will give me a bit of a break, three weeks of EOD and than maintenance during the holidays.

This week's maintenance should be good. I'm actually starting to get pretty busy with my work. A little more food in my system will help with the pressure.

So I caught myself in the morning light putting on a shirt and thought I'd get a picture of it. Doesn't look so bad when you can't see the saggy skin on the lower part of my stomach.

I get hard on myself a lot, especially as of late, but I really have come along way since the 312lb days.

The fall deficit has been slow, stagnant and pretty uneventful from a weight change position. After 14 weeks, down less than 2kg lol. Not my proudest accomplishment, but it is what it is. It's getting harder and harder. My girlfriend is baking cookies and stuff. There's a lot more treats around (damn, After 8's are good). It's been a bit tough to be on.

I'm still plugging away at EOD, though my focus has started to look to next year when all this variable food activity is out and things are back to some norm.

I'm planning to stop journaling as much on this site. I'm taking up my own journaling (pencil and paper) - plus week to week, there really isn't a need for it. I'll keep updating when the need is there, sort of like a check in, but I'll keep doing my thing on my own notebooks.

I thought I should pop in and give an update so far for this year. I've continued on the EOD model with a lot more adherence to the calories level. Things have been working actually great. The weight does come off pretty consistent (not fast, but predictably). It's also a lot easier to maintain, work into life and do for longer periods of time.

I've also been working on adding in treats into my day to day diet. The goal is to learn moderation and build a more healthy relationship with food - instead of the black/white, deficit/binge mentality that seems to have followed me during my weight loss process. I have to say that this was probably one of the best things I've ever did. Mentally, I can see I'm developing better habits with the things I like.

I am experiencing a health issue right now. I alluded to it last year about having this pain that seemed like gas (and I still think it is that), but I started to notice later in the year it was getting harder to swallow food (slower going down). I thought I could focus on modifying my diet to fix this issue, but I got to step point this year that I wasn't seeing improvements and it was getting quite time consuming (1hr to eat a sandwich). I visited my doctor and the diagnosis appears to be some intense acid in my stomach, and some sort of inflammation/damage was caused - creating this whole symptom of trouble with swallowing. So I'm on medication for that (60 days of it) to give my body time to repair and inflammation to go down.

So as of late I've been just working with that, and no focus on the diet aspect. My calories aren't out of touch, but my macros aren't the greatest. The medication is at least working though. I did get some blood work done, which showed my blood was right on where it should be - so that's good. Seems to hold to that thesis that weight loss fixes most of the ailments of people.